Most modern hearing aids are programmable for adaptation to the hearing aid users needs. Rationales have been developed, which provides a good first approach to the fitting of the hearing aid to the user. The rationales are data sets specifying the transfer function or the gain of the hearing aid over a relevant frequency area.
When a hearing-impaired person seeks help in the form of a hearing aid, a process of evaluation, prescription, initial fitting and subsequent fine-tuning takes place, at the end of which it is hoped that the client is experiencing an optimal degree of benefit from the hearing aid concomitant with his/her personal circumstances (degree and type of hearing loss, listening needs, disposable income etc.). Achievement of optimal benefit from a hearing aid fitting is dependent on many factors, not least of which is prescription of appropriate sound signal processing parameters according to which the hearing aid shall operate. Correct prescription of these parameters minimises the need for subsequent fine-tuning adjustments and ensures that such fine-tuning as is necessary proceeds from a meaningful starting point.
It has long been accepted that different users are best served with different choices of sound signal processing in their hearing aids. First and foremost, the user's audiometric data (e.g. absolute threshold of hearing at various frequencies) are often used as input data to a procedure whereby appropriate choices of frequency response and compression parameters are prescribed. The frequency response and the compression parameters prescription usually follow a set of rules named a rationale.
Apart from choice of rationale and the setting thereof the health care person dispensing the hearing aid to the end-user may have to chose a large number of settings within the hearing aid, in order that the user achieves the full benefit of the hearing aid. This could among others be: the range of programs offered to the user, the setting of release and attack time for compression, dynamics of noise damping and directionality shifts, dynamics of program shifts. Also there could be relations between these choices and the chosen rationale for the hearing impaired.
Prior art document WO 2003003792 A1 describes the combination of a given rationale with further parameters, namely the release and attack time constants. According to the document these constants are to be individually chosen, and they are not connected to other parameters of the hearing aid.
In prior art document U.S. Pat. No. 6,175,635 a hearing aid is described whereby external buttons can be linked to various processing schemes in the hearing aid. When the hearing aid according to this document has been programmed and the buttons linked to the preferred processing schemes, the hearing aid is ready for use. However, getting this far is not easy given the number variables to be set. Our invention is a possible solution to this problem.
The drawing will be described herein.